Leopold Bloom

Sigh. What a disappointment. Too much [WAY too much] exposition; by the thirty minute mark I commented that they had gotten lost in backstory...and it was another 15 or twenty minutes before the story started. And then the story was too big without anything to make the audience invested in the outcome, with CGI garbage stuffed into your eye sockets at every chance. And the Elves, around whom so much of the movie is based, had no real individual or collective personality. They were saccharine cute. Groan. The evil villain deserves his own paragraph, or even film school critique on how not to write, cast or direct a character. Simply, he was quite possibly the most lifeless and boring villain ever put on film. A good villain makes the viewer hate or fear the character; I ended up just hating the actor. Remember how good Heath Ledger was as the Joker? He was pretty much the precise opposite. This kid was also obviously extremely shlumpy and overweight, a visual expression of his plodding, lethargic performance. And Teddy! It's no skin off my teeth that they very obviously and deliberately wrote him out of the story, but I got the feeling that they did so not so much because he aged out of the demographic or for storytelling purposes but that they just had to get a black character in there (a pipsqueak sidekick picked up on the way to the shoot from central casting). Fine, great, but please put a little energy into finding an artful way to do so, and once the choice is made give the character something to do. This kid was really just along for the ride. If that character was eliminated completely the story would not have suffered any consequences. It tried to be too clever but lacked lacked any inspiration. We can put the very good first one down to Lightning in a Bottle.